A smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary basic feature phone. Smartphones are essentially handheld computers integrated within a mobile telephone. Growth in demand for smartphones boasting powerful processors, abundant memory, larger screens, and open operating systems has outpaced the rest of the mobile phone market for several years. According to a study by ComScore, over 45.5 million people in the United States owned smartphones in 2010 and it is the fastest growing segment of the mobile phone market, which comprised 234 million subscribers in the United States.
The first smartphone, called Simon, was designed by IBM in 1992, released to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Besides being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, send and receive fax, and games. Customers used a touch-screen to select phone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen “predictive” keyboard.
In 1997 Ericsson released the concept phone GS88—the first device labeled as a smartphone. In 2000 Ericsson released the touchscreen smartphone R380, the first device to use the new Symbian OS. It was followed up by P800 in 2002, the first camera smartphone.
In 2001, Microsoft announced that its Windows CE Pocket PC operating system (OS) would be offered as Microsoft Windows Powered Smartphone 2002. Microsoft originally defined its Windows Smartphone products as lacking a touchscreen and offering a lower screen resolution compared to its sibling Pocket PC devices.
In early 2002, Handspring released the Palm OS Treo smartphone, utilizing a full keyboard that combined wireless web browsing, email, calendar, and contact organizer with mobile third-party applications that could be downloaded or synced with a computer.
Also in 2002, Research In Motion (RIM) released the first BlackBerry, which was the first smartphone optimized for wireless email use. By December 2009, it had achieved a total customer base of 32 million subscribers by December 2009.
In 2007 Nokia launched the Nokia N95, a consumer-oriented smartphone which integrated a wide range of features: GPS, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash, 3G and wi-fi connectivity, and TV-out. In the next few years these features would become standard on high-end smartphones.
Later in 2007, Apple Inc. introduced its first iPhone®. It was initially expensive—costing $500 for the cheaper of two models on top of a two year contract. It was one of the first smartphones to be mainly controlled through its touchscreen (the others being the LG Prada and the HTC Touch, which were also released in 2007). Not only was it the first mobile phone to use a multi-touch interface, it also featured it featured a web browser that was vastly superior to those in use by its competitors. Though Steve Jobs publicly stated that the iPhone lacked 3G support due to the immaturity, power usage, and physical size requirements of 3G chipsets at the time, it was rumored that the CDMA2000 Network Providers (Verizon and Sprint) refused to allow the iPhone on their network because Jobs wanted total control of the application store associated with the iPhone. In July 2008, Apple introduced its second generation iPhone which had a lower upfront price and 3G support. It also created the App Store with both free and paid applications. The App Store can deliver smartphone applications developed by third parties directly to the iPhone or iPod Touch over wifi or cellular network without using a PC to download. The App Store has been a huge success for Apple and by April 2010 hosted more than 185,000 applications. The App Store hit three billion application downloads in early January 2010. The iPhone 3GS was the third generation of iPhone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Introduced on Jun. 8, 2009, it provided faster performance, a camera with higher resolution and video capability, voice control, and support for 7.2 Mbit/s HSDPA downloading. The iPhone 4, which is the fourth generation iPhone, is particularly marketed for video calling, consumption of media such as books and periodicals, movies, music, and games, and for general web and e-mail access.
Android®, a cross platform operating system for smartphones, was released in 2008. Android is an Open Source platform backed by Google, along with major hardware and software developers (such as Intel, HTC, ARM, Motorola and Samsung, to name a few), that form the Open Handset Alliance. The first phone to use the Android OS was the HTC Dream, branded for distribution by T-Mobile as the G1. The software suite included on the phone consists of integration with Google's proprietary applications, such as Maps, Calendar, and Gmail, and a full HTML web browser. Third-party applications (apps) are available via the Android Market, including both free and paid apps. When released by Sprint Nextel on Jun. 1, 2010, the HTC Evo set the standard, not only for other Android smartphones, but all other smart phones as well. The Evo featured a 1 GHz QSD 8650 processor, a 4.3-inch WVGA resolution capacitive multi-touch screen, an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with auto focus and 2×LED flash, a 1.3 megapixel fixed-focus front-facing web-cam, 1 GB of ROM, 512 MB of RAM, 8 GB of installed onboard storage, a microSD memory card slot, 802.11 b/g connectivity, GPS/aGPS, HDMI out, and a mobile Wi-Fi router. As of the third quarter of 2010, 43.6 percent of the smartphones sold in the U.S. used the Android OS, up 11 percent from the previous quarter and up from only 2 percent the previous year. Apple came in second with 23 percent, up 1 percent, followed by RIM in third place, which declined from 28 percent to 22 percent.
Apple Computer and Google have very different philosophies. Apple has taken a Chairman Mao approach to handset management and application availability: It knows what is best for the proletariat. Consistent with that philosophy, Apple has designed its iPhones and the resident operating systems so that it is impossible to directly record telephone conversations. There are, presently, two approaches to circumventing this stumbling block to full control over an Apple smartphone. The first approach involves the routing of calls through a third-party service, such as Google voice, and recording the conversations on third-party servers. The problem with this first approach is that the smartphone user loses custody and control of the recorded conversation. The second approach is to “jailbreak” the Apple smartphone. This term signifies gaining unauthorized access to the root directory of iOS (the iPhone's Free-BSD-based operating system) and altering internal operating system function. One jailbreak application, titled SpoofApp, allows an iPhone user to change the caller ID received by person being called, changes the voice of the caller or records telephone calls. SpoofCard is the Caller ID Spoofing provider, used in combination with SpoofApp with purchased minutes, that handles the actual phone calls. When a call is initiated with SpoofApp on a telephone, the call information along with personal identification number (PIN), that identifies the caller, is transmitted to SpoofCard. Calls are routed through SpoofCard's servers, where the caller ID spoofing, voice changing or call recording actually takes place. Thus, SpoofApp provides the application and interface, while SpoofCard provides the requested phone services. In some states recording phone calls is illegal unless both parties know the recording is taking place. That is why calls to customer service representatives invariably have a recording which states that all or part of the phone conversation may be recorded.
Google, on the other hand, has taken what can be considered more of a hands-off approach to handset management and application availability. Thus, applications can readily be downloaded which will record telephone conversations on smartphones running the Android operating system. For example, the free application AllCallRecorder (the current version, as of April 2011, is 1.15.1) records both incoming and outgoing calls on Android smartphones. Telephone conversations are saved as digital files in 3GPP format, a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 3G UMTS multimedia services. The format is used on 3G mobile phones but can also be played on some 2G and 4G phones. Recorded calls can be delivered via bluetooth, e-mail, and other digital transmission methods. The AllCallRecorder application has garnered its share of negative reviews. Android users complain about crashes, failure to record, choppy playback, and inability to work on certain models of Android smartphones. They also complain about the 3GPP file format, and want to know why a more standard format such as WMA, WAV, or MP3 is not used. WMA, or Windows Media Audio, is a proprietary audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. WAV, WAVE, or Waveform Audio File Format is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream, encoded with linear pulse-code modulation, on Windows-based personal computers. is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players. MP3 is an audio-specific encoding format that was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as part of its MPEG-1 standard and later extended in MPEG-2 standard. MP3 uses a form of lossy data compression that is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording, which still sounds like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. An MP3 file created using the setting of 128 kbits will result in a file that is about 11 times smaller than the CD file created from the original audio source. An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bit rates, with higher or lower resulting quality. Data compression is accomplished using psychoacoustic models, which discards or reduces the precision of sound components that are less audible to human hearing, and then records the remaining information in an efficient manner.
What is needed is an apparatus which enables an iPhone user to record both incoming and outgoing telephone conversations in common audio file formats, without losing custody and control over the recorded conversations, and without the need to alter the internal function of the iOS operating system.